India revisited: Mumbai’s Irani Cafes for The Guardian

I’ve been lucky enough to visit India three times. The first was as an 12-year-old with a bad fringe and even worse bum bag: awkwardly chubby, pale and privileged and utterly gobsmacked by the smells, colours, craziness and social disparity I witnessed. I’d joined my parents on a last minute trip to Varanasi because my […]

My (Uyen Luu’s) Vietnamese Kitchen

So I’m sorry I have been such a bad blogger of late. I know it’s been a ridiculously long while since I last blogged. I don’t mean to fob you off, and I know this is a lame excuse, but it’s not like I’ve been sitting around eating digestives with butter and salt and catching […]

Food Styling Experiment: Persian pavlova; lamb shank curry; mackerel en papillotes; clams, and tonka bean chilli truffles

If you’ve been following my Twitter or Instagram (BrixtonRose) of late, you might have seen that the other day I got together with my pal, the lovely and hugely talented photographer Helen Cathcart for a day of cooking, styling and photography. I’m a massive fan of Helen’s work, and we’ve worked together in a writer […]

Christmas preserves: clementine and Campari marmalade

A few weeks ago I came upon a glut of glass jars (thanks to a frantic clean out of my mother’s fridge, which seemed to be stocked for the end of the world with preserves that went off in 2003), and thought it would be nice to make some festive preserves. It’s not something I’ve […]

Brixton one pot fabada

T’other night I had an impromptu gathering, and needed to pull something yummy and filling out of the bag, on a pre-Christmas budget. Inspired by a dish cooked for me once by my good friend and fellow Brixtonite Liz Marvin, I came up with a sort of sausage casserole-cum-fabada – my take on the lovely unctuous […]

A winter’s feast: slow roasted rosemary lamb shoulder, Jansson’s Temptation and kale salad

When it’s getting dark at 4pm, you know it’s time to start feasting. I had some friends round last weekend and I wanted to spoil them with cosy home-cooked dishes that would warm their cockles and make them feel sated and happy. Because I knew I had a tough week ahead of me, and because […]

Warm salad of roasted aubergine and broccoli with anchovy lemon dressing

I love broccoli. It’s one of the foods I really crave when I’ve been overindulging, which, as you know, happens fairly regularly. I came up with this recipe after a couple of days of eating, when I got back to my flat and happened to have some aubergine and broc in the fridge. I wanted […]

Danish oyster boot camp (look away now if you don’t like oysters)

As you might have noticed from my rather oyster-centric Twitter feed, last week I spent a few days in Denmark snuffling out oysters. The trip coincided with Denmark’s Oyster Week – an event aimed at raising awareness about the country’s oyster production. We traveled to the Wadden Sea Centre (a UNESCO World Heritage Centre) in […]